Cuba to Lay Off 500,000 State Workers

Apparently Fidel Castro wasn’t kidding when he said the “Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore” last week. Cuba announced on Monday that it will lay off a whopping 500,000 state workers over the next six months (the island has a total population of 11 million) and will open up the island’s private sector in order to replace them. President Raul Castro, brother of Fidel, had promised to eliminate 1 million state jobs, a full fifth of the country’s workforce, but people did not expect him to move so quickly. Cuba’s government controls 90 percent of the economy.